Il fattore umano Landless souls - Original language

The record temperatures and drought we are experiencing in Italy are a good reminder of how climate change is an emergency that affects every aspect of our lives, and the scorching summer has signalled this once again. There are countries and areas of the planet where the effects of the environmental crisis are more evident and produce upheavals in people's lives. Bangladesh, land of rivers downstream from the Himalayas, is among them, and telling the story helps us understand the dangers we face, from the salinity of the water that damages crops, to totally unpredictable seasons. "The Lost" recounts the lives of climate refugees who every day leave the countryside of the North submerged by increasingly frequent and abundant floods, who abandon the villages of the South where entire crops are destroyed by unpredictable and extremely violent cyclones. The stories of people fleeing the climatic events and their journey to Dhaka, where every day more than a thousand people get off ferries and buses destined to live in the slums, the immense slums of the Bangladeshi capital. Their arrival in the city is not the end of their troubles: here they risk being driven out of the shacks they have just built by building speculation. The protagonist of the frame interview is Amitav Ghosh, a writer of Indian origin living in the United States, who has dedicated his latest essays and novels to the theme of the effects of climate change.